DIY russian folk bot playing from EEG

Zoe Romano — June 6th, 2014

“Turbo-gusli” or “Gusli-samogudy” is a russian folk bot made by Moscow media-artist, musician and engineer of strange-sounding mechanisms – Dmitry Morozov. It’s basically a portable electro-acoustic orchestra inspired by “Gusli-samogudy”, a self-playing gusli, the oldest Russian multi-string plucked instrument, and very common in old russian fairy tales.

The system works in 3 different modes: when it plays algorithmically from Pure Data patch, when it’s controlled by Emotiv EPOC EEG interface and in MIDI mode (all of them using Pduino library and custom patch in Pure Data).

It runs on 2 Arduino Uno – mainly for interacting with the computer using standard FIRMATA and secondly only to control the stepper motor which is playing random bass notes when it’s triggered by the first Arduino.